Yoo-hoo,” Mrs. Potter called as she knocked. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but we’ve had terrible news.”
“I know,” Lily said through the closed bedroom door, drying her hair. Even though it was four in the afternoon, she’d taken a bath. It was the only way to get rid of the morgue smell.
“Well, hon, my heart goes out to you, but there’s some detectives here to see you and search the room. I took the liberty of bringing them upstairs.”
Lily dashed on makeup, molded her damp hair into waves, donned a skirt and blouse. Put on earrings, her watch. Finally, she flung open the door. Pico and Magruder walked in, their eyes already scanning the room.
“I’d ask you to sit down,” Lily said, “but as you can see…” She spread her hands.
Magruder merely grunted and asked if she’d tidied up or thrown anything away.
Lily said she hadn’t, but added pointedly that five days had already elapsed since Kitty’s roommates first reported her missing. “I don’t think the police took it seriously. They poked around and left.”
Pico’s lip curled, his eyes pensive in the moment before he looked away. Magruder’s small, humorless eyes drilled into her and he said, “Do you have any idea how many young women come here from all over the world and disappear into the wilds of Hollywood?”
Without waiting for an answer, he launched into a speech so canned he couldn’t even feign earnestness anymore. “The vast majority turn up alive, and each one’s got her own reasons for not being found. They’re running from parents. Husbands. Boyfriends. Brats and bad reputations. They come to reinvent themselves, start new lives. And contrary to what the public may think, the LAPD is not a human fetch-and-retrieve service. Unless there’s evidence of foul play or reason to suspect a crime’s occurred, we don’t get involved. Which is why Mrs. Croggan’s calls to the Hollywood station got the response they did. But we’re Homicide. This is a whole different ball game.”
“Now that it’s too late,” Lily pointed out.
“Why don’t you go downstairs and have some coffee, calm your nerves,” Pico said. “The Crime Lab boys’ll be here any minute and they’ll turn the place upside down, dusting for prints, looking for blood residue.”
Lily felt her heart flip over. “You think it happened here?”
Pico crossed his arms and made a disparaging noise.
“It’s all part of our investigation,” Magruder said. “Maybe the killer knew her. Maybe he left a pack of matches we can trace back to a bar he frequents. Maybe his dog shed on his sports jacket and we’ll match those to hairs found on the deceased. You’d be surprised at what we can do these days.”
“Mrs. Croggan would like the body shipped home to Champaign for burial,” Lily said. “Do you know when the autopsy might be complete?”
Magruder checked his notes. “She gave us permission to release the body to you,” he said. “But the coroner’ll need to run tests. With an open investigation, we’ll want to keep the body on hand.”
Lily cleared her throat. “What tests?”
“That’s police business.”
“Did the medical examiner confirm how she died?”
“Death by ligature,” Pico said. “She was strangled.”
“Dear God.” Lily closed her eyes and prayed they’d catch Kitty’s killer soon so Mrs. Croggan could bury her daughter. “I’ll let the mother know.”
“She knows,” Magruder said.
Lily noticed Pico bending over the ashtray on the vanity table.
“Did Miss Hayden smoke?” He held it up.
“I keep telling you we never met,” Lily said. “Her roommates will know.”
“You can bet we’re going to talk to them,” Magruder boomed. “Boarders, neighbors, boyfriends, studio people. Everyone she ever batted an eyelash at. We’ll research her life, her troubles, her finances. We’ll reconstruct what she did and who she saw the day she disappeared. Maybe she was careless about the company she kept.”
Pico was behind her, just out of range of the vanity mirror. The skin along Lily’s back rippled. He was watching her. She moved to catch his reflection, but he glided back out of sight.
“…and if you think of anything after we’re gone,” Magruder was saying, “pick up the phone.” He scribbled the number. “Day or night, someone’s there. Now. Do you know if she kept an appointment book? A diary? An address book?”
Lily waved her hand. “You’re welcome to check. Did Mrs. Potter tell you that a man from RKO came by a few days ago, asking questions and looking through her room?”
“Clarence Fletcher,” Pico said. “We intend to talk to him.”
Magruder gave a sudden belch. “Excuse me.” He swabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. “Big lunch today with the Culver City chief of police.”
“Culver City,” Lily said. “Isn’t that where RKO is?”
Where Kitty had worked?
A foxy expression lit up Pico’s eyes.
“Yes,” Magruder said with a hearty laugh. “And also Metro and Monogram and Vanguard. It’s quite a movie town and they’ve got their hands full with those unruly stars.”
He shifted, and she felt suddenly how big and out of scale he looked in Kitty’s turret room.
“Especially the ones who date gangsters,” Lily said offhandedly.
Magruder was at her side in an instant.
“What have you heard?” he asked in a menacing tone.
She gave him an innocent look. “Weren’t all the actresses crazy for Bugsy Siegel?”
“Bugsy Siegel was shot to death in his Beverly Hills living room two years ago. His killer was never caught. What’s that got to do with Kitty Hayden?”
“Maybe she liked the fast life too, and it caught up with her. I’m sure Kitty’s roommates can tell you whether she knew any gangsters.”
“Thanks for the job tip,” Magruder said sourly.
He scowled and flipped open Kitty’s portfolio, scrutinizing each photo—modeling jobs and studio stills—the sultry poses in evening gowns, then shorts and a straw hat, bathing-suit cheesecake.
“I hope you interview Mrs. Potter too,” Lily said, flashing to the landlady’s odd demeanor when they’d met, her suggestion that a room might come available. As if she knew.
Magruder guffawed. “Mrs. Potter and the department go way back, Miss Kessler,” he said. “As for the girls, I’m gonna sic Pico on ’em. He’s got a way with the ladies. They call us Beauty and the Beast, don’t they, Pico?”
Detective Pico leaned against the windowsill and crossed his lanky legs in a slow and deliberate fashion. A red flush stained his throat, crept up his jawbone. Something told her it was anger, not embarrassment. She felt a strange desire to goad him, to see the two cops come to blows. She smelled spilled beer, peanuts, rubber mats, bloodlust, the roar of the crowd. She blinked and was back in the room.
“Miss Kessler is too smart to be seduced by the surface of things,” Pico said.
Car tires squealed out front. Magruder walked to the window.
“Here come the boys now.” He turned to Pico. “Let’s meet up at the Boulevard substation. And now, if you’ll excuse me, we’ve got a murderer to catch.”
He tipped his hat and slipped out.
With Magruder’s departure, the room seemed to expand. Lily hadn’t liked the bull-necked detective, found him condescending and full of false heartiness. She disliked Pico for different reasons. His arrogance, cynicism. But mostly, the unnerving sense she’d gotten, back at the station, that he’d instantly disliked her. Still, she was used to law enforcement types and their games. The jaded older one who didn’t take anything seriously and his intense young partner who never lightened up.
“What did your partner mean by that crack about Mrs. Potter?” Lily asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”
Again that tone that suggested he was throwing down a gauntlet. She walked to the window, watched the LAPD men unload metal boxes out of a van. Pico followed her, shadowing her, mimicking her movements. She wished he wouldn’t stand so close.
“I’m sure Kitty’s roommates will have some names for you to pursue,” Lily said. She wondered how to bring up what she’d overheard in the alley. “Did they mention any boyfriends? Any trouble Kitty might have been in?”
“We already spoke to the redhead.” Pico checked his notepad. “Roseanne ‘Red’ Viertel. She gave us a coupla leads.”
“Like what?” Lily was surprised; Red hadn’t told her much of anything.
With a tight smile, Pico tucked his notepad away. “What’s this, Miss Kessler? Are we playing Twenty Questions?”
Lily’s cheeks grew hot. She’d slipped unconsciously into the rhythm. You asking questions, them parrying, you rephrasing, the pressure building until finally they broke and something useful emerged.
But he unsettled her, this long, tall drink of water. And now he was following her around the room, trying to spook her. They learned it in detective school. Well, she knew a few tactics too.
“Just one question, then.”
She gave him a tomboy smile that hid more subtle wiles and leaned her ass against the sill. Examined him from downcast lashes.
Use what you’ve got.
“Have you talked to Max Vranizan?”
Behind Pico’s eyes, something clicking into focus. “I thought you only got here yesterday, Miss Kessler. Yet you seem to know an awful lot. What can you tell us about Mr. Vranizan?” he asked, his voice cool and businesslike.
Lily shrugged. “Just that he was a special effects guy who also worked at RKO. He was sweet on Kitty, but she had her sights set higher than a toy maker.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t. The roomies did last night.”
Pico’s eyes grew razor sharp even as his voice grew more measured. “Red said this Max fellow was obsessed with Kitty.”
“That doesn’t mean he killed her. He’s probably a harmless freak,” Lily said, fishing for information. “A grown-up guy who lives in a fantasy world of dinosaurs and apes and monsters. A little kid.”
“Little kids can be cunning. I’d stay away from him. And stay away from RKO too. You’re unlikely to get discovered.”
So that’s what he thought she was after!
She regarded him coolly. “I have no desire to be an actress.”
“Then again, if you play your cards right, you might even be able to take over Miss Hayden’s contract.”
“I would never—”
His eyes crinkled. “Of course not. That’s why you showed up here as soon as you heard, then moved right into Kitty Hayden’s room and into her life.”
Lily uncoiled herself, stretched to her full height, but still barely saw over his shoulder.
“You know nothing about me. I’m hardly some starstruck ingénue. I grew up in L.A. And I’m staying here because Kitty’s mother asked me to find her daughter.”
Pico rolled his eyes. “Then you’re free to go. The professionals will take over.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
She was irked that he’d riled her so easily. “I hope you display a better bedside manner when you talk to Kitty’s roommates or you won’t get very far.”
A wicked light danced in his eyes. “I’ve never had any complaints about my bedside manner. In fact…”
“Then let me be the first,” she said, ignoring the innuendo.
He shook his head. “You don’t give up, do you? Anybody ever tell you that you have a masculine brain?”
“Now you’re insulting me?”
“Far from it.” The idea seemed to entertain him.
“Maybe I just have a criminal brain,” Lily said.
“Oh?”
“You want to catch a murderer, you have to think like one. That’s all.”
The amusement faded from his eyes. “That’s exactly why they’ll never let women on the force,” he said.
“What’s why?” she asked.
“Because if you want to catch rats, you’ve got to swim in the sewer, and that’s no job for a girl. You’d lose your sense of wonder and goodness about the world, and we can’t have that.”
Lily’s mouth twitched. “Save it, Detective. We’re not helpless simpering creatures that have to be protected. We’ve held down jobs, traveled the world. Seen people die. Nobody’s innocent anymore.”
“The war’s been over four years. Things are going back to how they were.”
Lily thought of the CIA, reassigning its women agents to desk jobs. Her bosses had claimed their Soviet contacts felt more comfortable handing over secrets to men. That the female temperament was unsuited to surveillance, interrogation, high-stakes dissembling. That women were ruled by their emotions, while espionage required cool, hard reason. No matter what successful female spy Lily brought up, they had an answer: Virginia Hill was an exception; Christine Granville had gotten lucky; Amy Thorpe traded intelligence for sex. Lily’s gorge rose at being lectured by yet another man in authority.
“Not everyone wants to go back to how things were.”
“Sure they do. People are settling down, having families. It’s the American way.”
The taunting tone was back. You want it too, his voice seemed to say. Just admit it.
“I guess I’m un-American, then.”
Pico clicked his tongue. “I’d watch where you say that. You said you’ve been gone since 1944. Well, things have changed at home.”
“I didn’t mean I was a Red,” Lily said frostily. “I mean I want to be able to work and live on my own and walk home from the trolley stop at night without looking over my shoulder. That’s why Kitty’s murder terrifies me and every woman in L.A. It could have been any of us.”
Pico looked ready to argue. But just then the LAPD Crime Lab squad arrived at the door—four men who carried metal toolboxes and cameras.
“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need to ask me any more questions,” she said, slipping past them into the doorway.
“I think we’re through, Miss Kessler.”
And good riddance.
But they weren’t through. An hour later, Pico appeared downstairs. Jinx, who’d been recounting a story about how Kitty had once loaned her an expensive dress for an audition, trailed off. A crackling tension and flirtatiousness seeped into the kitchen, chasing away the worst of the gloom.
“Coffee, Detective?” Red swished over with the pot, her hips approaching a rolling boil.
“Just what I needed, thank you.” Pico sat down.
“Sugar and cream?” She bent over the table, cleavage popping.
“This is wonderful.” Pico beamed at the young women arrayed around him like petals of a flower. Lily wondered if he meant to pluck them, one by one.
A new girl walked into the kitchen. She was about Lily’s height and weight, with brown hair in a similar cut, but her features were more angular, her posture straighter, her demeanor brisk, reminding Lily of a female pilot she’d known during the war.
“You must be Louise Dobbs,” Lily said, going up to her.
“Yes,” the girl said. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “And I’m so sorry. When I sent the cable, I never imagined…maybe if I’d done it sooner…?”
Lily squeezed her hand and was about to respond when Pico broke in.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Miss Dobbs. She’d been dead several days by the time…Hey, now, hey, now,” he said with embarrassment as the girls launched into wordless snuffles and tears.
Jinx was the first to recover. She propped her trembling chin in one hand. “Tell us, Detective, do you have any idea who killed her?”
Pico leaned back. “Well, now, the LAPD always has leads.”
God, he was too much, Lily thought. And Kitty’s roommates, veering from coy flirtation to tragic swooning and back in the blink of a mascaraed eye, as if this were some kind of audition. But maybe it was at that. A husband audition.
Fumiko, busy at the stove, was the only one who didn’t join in.
Red pulled her hair back with one hand, cupping her temple Greta Garbo–style. Lily could have sworn her voice had dropped an octave. “Detective Pico,” she asked in a sultry voice, “do you always get your man?”
“I always get my woman too,” Pico said. “We can’t assume anything at this stage.”
Pico took a sip of coffee, sighed with appreciation. “You make a fine cup of joe, Miss Viertel,” he told Red.
“Do you want to brief us on what you’ve got so far?” Jinx asked, eager to reclaim center stage.
“Since you asked so politely,” he said with an arch look at Lily, “all right. But first, I’d like to know. Did Kitty keep a journal? Or a calendar? How about a phone book?”
Jeanne, hands fluttering with her hair, said she’d walked into Kitty’s room to borrow a sweater once and seen her writing in a white leather journal.
Pico frowned. “We didn’t find anything like that.”
“Wouldn’t she keep her calendar and phone book in her purse?” Beverly asked haltingly.
“There was no purse found with the, ah, Miss Hayden,” Pico said.
Lily cleared her throat. “What about the RKO man? Could he have taken it?”
Annoyed, Pico jotted in his notebook. “I certainly hope not.”
The detective now told them that Kitty had been seen dancing in Palm Springs nightspots two weeks earlier with known associates of gangster Mickey Cohen. Lily flashed immediately to the small man who’d administered the brutal beating. Was he one of them? No wonder Magruder had lit up when she’d mentioned gangsters.
At Cohen’s name, Beverly gave a small moan. The detective turned to her.
“What can you tell us about that?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know anything about gangsters,” Beverly said. “She told us she went there with a girlfriend.”
“Ah,” Pico said. “What was her name?”
Lily watched the girls ripple uneasily under the detective’s gaze. She felt the swirl and eddy of conflicted allegiances. The OSS had taught her to listen and observe, to be patient. Kitty’s roommates were afraid of something. They hadn’t told the detective everything they knew. From the way Pico’s thumb and forefinger tightened almost imperceptibly against his pen, Lily knew he sensed it too.
“Kitty never told us her name,” Red said, looking around the room, as if defying anyone to contradict her.
Pico raised one eyebrow.
“Do you think there’s any connection to Mimi Boomhower?” asked Louise, practical once more.
“Who?” said Lily.
“Mimi was a Bel Air socialite and widow who disappeared several months ago,” Pico explained. “Left her front door open and her lights burning. No one’s seen her since. And no body’s turned up.” He grimaced. “Unlike your roommate.
“Now,” he said, surveying the solemn faces, “I’d like to question each of you separately. And I want you to answer me as thoroughly as you can, thinking hard to dredge up every tiny detail you can remember, because it might be that one insignificant thing that helps us catch her killer.”
“She was such a dear,” said Beverly with a sniffle. “If she caught a fly she’d release it outside. Some of the memories I’ve got, they’re almost too painful to recount.”
Pico’s smile grew wider, his voice more expansive. “Well, take a couple aspirin for the pain and try, or I might think you’re withholding evidence.”
At his words, Fumiko, who was peeling and chopping a gnarled brown root on a cutting board, cursed under her breath and popped a finger in her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said. “I cut myself.”
While Pico interviewed Kitty’s roommates, Lily went for a brisk walk to clear her head. As she slipped out, several men clutching notepads and cameras scurried toward her.
“Miss, were you a roommate of Kitty Hayden? Can you tell us about her boyfriends? What was she like?”
The questions came fast and furious, a barrage of words, the cameras exploding in front of her. Holding up her purse to block her face, Lily made her way down the street, but they followed her like a moving organism. Most persistent of all was a young blonde with coral lipstick and a matching jacket. At least she didn’t have a camera, just a notepad. The woman’s heels clicked conspiratorially as she whispered questions to Lily just out of reach of the men, appealing to their shared bond as young women. Lily put her head down and kept walking.
Undeterred, the reporter trailed after her.
“I’m with Confidential magazine, miss, and I’ve been authorized to offer you a onetime payment in exchange for an interview. Perhaps we could go somewhere private”—a meaningful look back to the men five paces behind them—“where we can—”
“Please stop,” Lily said. “I don’t want to talk to the press.”
Lily saw face powder dusting faint hairs on the reporter’s upper lip. The woman smiled, exposing small milky teeth. Reaching into a pocket, she pulled out a bill, snapping it crisply.
Despite herself, Lily looked. It was a hundred-dollar bill.
“I thought so,” the woman said with a laugh.
Lily slapped the bill from the woman’s hand. “That’s what I think of your foul offer.”
As she ran off, the woman called out, “Violet McCree at Confidential. Call anytime, twenty-four hours a day, the service will find me.”